NDP tries to turn support into seats

When it comes to the New Democratic Party’s chances in Quebec, the line was at one point: “Thomas Mulcair and a prayer.”

Not any more.

With polls now suggesting a party surge in Quebec in the dying days of the campaign, the new question is just how far will voters go Monday.

Will the people telling pollsters they will vote NDP change their minds and run back to their traditional roots?

And who exactly are some of the people apparently poised to get elected. Some, the party admits, are political greenhorns and never expected to be part of a bandwagon effect if that indeed is what happens Monday.

Some - especially in the regions - are campaigning only on a part-time basis or are students. One candidate, Ruth-Ellen Brosseau, in Berthier-Maskinongé, is in fact on vacation in Las Vegas, Le Nouvelliste revealed this week.

Today, even the party is surprised by what has now been tagged in Quebec as the “Effet Orange,” and is scrambling to cope with the new reality.“This (a surge in the polls) is the kind of stuff you dream about, right?” a senior party official said asking that his name not be used. “But it’s not over until it’s over.”

Two new polls Wednesday confirmed the trend again. An Angus Reid-La Presse poll published Wednesday placed the NDP second in Canada in voter intentions behind the Conservatives.

But they are No. 1 in Quebec. The NDP now is sitting at 38 per cent of voter intentions here compared with 29 per cent for the Bloc, 16 per cent for the Liberals and 14 per cent for the Conservatives.

Angus Reid vice-president Jaideep Mukerji said that while the support appeared fragile at the beginning of the campaign it is no longer a “flash in the pan.”

Another poll, by Nanos, pegs NDP support in Quebec at 36.5 per cent, up from a low of 12 per cent at the beginning of the campaign.

The Bloc is second, with 24.2 per cent, down from a high of 38.1 per cent on March 15. The Liberals and Conservatives are in third and fourth place.

The web seat projection site, ThreeHundredEight.com, now predicts six NDP seats in Quebec, up from their current single seat of Outremont held by former Liberal MNA Thomas Mulcair.

With poll numbers like this, the seat complement could grow should there actually be a bigger wave of support on election day.

But the numbers point to a problem for the NDP - the lack of a political machine or boots on the ground - to actually get those votes into the ballot box.

Big parties like the Liberals and Bloc Québécois, which maintain sophisticated phone banks of their traditional supporters, have enough volunteers to call voters, offering seniors, for example, a lift to the voting station. The process is called ‘getting the vote,’ out.

The NDP has nowhere near that kind of organization and knows it.

“Thomas Mulcair (the MP for Outremont), said it well when he noted you can’t take a poll and put in the ballot box,” said the NDP’s Quebec communications director Cédric Williams in an interview Wednesday.

Privately, NDP officials say they have decent organizations in about 20 of Quebec’s 75 ridings. Montreal ridings - with a ready pool of university students - are easier to organize than the rural ones where the NDP has been dormant for years.

Outremont, where it all began, can certainly muster 500 volunteers.

In the hours before last Saturday’s massive NDP rally in the downtown riding of Laurier-Saint-Marie, held by Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe, which drew 1,500 people, students roamed the streets with flyers promoting the event.

The party signed up 300 volunteers at that event alone and they will be put to work Monday, Williams said.

The situation in the regions is less rosy. The NDP has campaign offices open in only 16 ridings.

Some party workers are coming in from Ottawa to help. Volunteers are also going to be sent all the way up north, to help star NDP candidate Roméo Saganash - a leading figure in the Grand Council of the Cree for 30 years - in his quest to win the vast riding of Abitibi-Baie-James-Nunavik-Eeyou.

When Saganash arrived in his campaign offices, the phones still had not been connected.

But while party insiders concede their machine is weak, they say sometimes - such as when the Action démocratique du Québec won big provincially on a shoestring in 2007 - surprises happen.

“These things happen,” said an insider. “They don’t happen often but they do happen when all of a sudden, ‘machines’ get beaten by enthusiasm.”

The NDP will try and support their other top but lesser known Quebec candidates. Polls have shown they have a shot a winning as well.

The list includes:

• Françoise Boivin in Gatineau. A lawyer and former Liberal MP for the same riding from 2004-2006. During this campaign Boivin denied any wrongdoing in the hiring of her staff when she was MP. An article in Le Devoir said she had hired a woman who was her common-law spouse as part of her staff, a violation of government ethics rules.

• Nycole Turmel (Hull-Aylmer). Turmel is the former national President of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the first women to ever hold that position.

• Alexandre Boulerice (Rosemont-La Petite Patrie). Boulerice is a former union representative and television journalist and member of Greenpeace and Amnesty International.

• Tyrone Benskin (Jeanne-Le Ber). Benskin is artistic director of the Black Theatre Workshop, Canada’s oldest black theatre, and national vice-president of the ACTRA artists’ union, and defender of Quebec and Canadian culture in Ottawa for more than ten years.

Beyond that list, the NDP has a long list of virtually unknown candidates. Even NDP leader Jack Layton admits he does not know them all personally.

“I am an older man now,” Layton said last week when asked if he could name other candidates beyond his six stars. “I sometimes need a sheet to name all 308 candidates. I am not going to play that game.”

The party denies some of these candidates are just figureheads to round out the ballot. But La Presse Wednesday revealed a list of candidates who had yet to complete their education.

The NDP is running a Université Laval language student, Alexandrine Latendresse, against powerful Quebec City politician Josée Verner in the riding of Louis Saint-Laurent.

Latendresse boasts on her Facebook page a strong attachment to “iced vodka, wrestling and procrastination.”

But NDP insiders are not discouraged.

And some first-time candidates insist they not be sold short just because they are new.

“Is there really a party which has 308 experienced MP candidates,” said Joanne Corbeil, a first-stime candidate running in Westmount-Ville Marie. “It’s always heathy for a party to have new faces and new perspectives. Otherwise you have same old, same old.”

pauthier@montrealgazette.com

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